Hilton Head Island, SC – April 14, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 11:1-11; Mark 14:17-25
A Communion Meditation by John M. Miller
Text – And those who went before and those who followed cried out, Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” – Mark 11:9 (RSV)
During Lent I have been preaching a series of sermons based on the events of Holy Week according to the Gospel of Mark. The first one began with what is known as the “cleansing of the temple.” Mark said this occurred on the day after Palm Sunday, while Matthew and Luke said the temple incident took place immediately after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Whatever may have been the historical fact, we have been following the chronology of Holy Week as Mark recorded it. Today, because this is Palm Sunday, we shall go back to Mark’s telling of the Palm Sunday processional, and then jump forward to part of his account of Jesus with the disciples at the Last Supper.
All four of the Gospels were careful to note that Jesus rode into the Holy City on a donkey or on a colt. Either way, Jesus intended it deliberately to be a small animal, and nothing like a large warhorse. Mark says it was a colt. I take that to mean a young horse, and not a young donkey. A grown man would be too heavy to ride on a young donkey. Whatever was the actual animal Jesus rode, he wanted to make certain that no one could assume he was coming into Jerusalem as a warrior. That would alert the Romans so much that they might arrest him right then and there. Therefore we may conclude that Jesus had other things he intended to say and do before his arrest, which he was sure was inevitably coming, despite having entered Jerusalem in peace.
A crowd appeared when Jesus and his disciples came into the city. As Jesus rode along, the crowd cut down branches from the trees and laid them in the road ahead of him. Mark writes, “And those who went before him and those who followed cried out, ‘Hosanna! Blessed be he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed be the kingdom of our father David that is coming! Hosanna in the highest!’”
The Hebrew word hosanna means “Save Now.” It was a statement of national longing which had been growing for centuries in the hearts of many Jews. They pined for the day when the power exhibited by the kingdom of David ten centuries earlier would return. Since David’s time the Israelite kingdom had split into two parts. Then the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians, never to be re-constructed. Later the southern kingdom was conquered by the Babylonians. Later than that the Jews were an independent nation only for a century. After that the Romans came and occupied Judea almost a century before the time of Jesus.
The last thing Jesus wanted to hear was a crowd loudly suggesting that he might be the messianic figure who would reconstitute a liberated Israel. He knew that would quickly alarm the Romans. But Jesus could not control the excitement of the Jews who had come to Jerusalem on the occasion of that long-ago Passover festival week. To the crowd, Jesus entered the Holy City in messianic triumph. Because of their enthusiasm, Jesus must have felt great trepidation over how the excitement of the joyful crowd would appear to the Romans and their governor, the cunning and cruel Pontius Pilate.
On whatever day the cleansing of the temple actually occurred, it illustrated that Jesus was opposed to the temple priesthood, but definitely not the Roman army of occupation, at least not overtly. Nothing Jesus said or did in the next few days posed either a direct or a veiled threat to Rome. However, he did question the status quo of normative Judaism in many pointed and piercing ways. He meant to do that. Therefore some of the Jewish leaders did everything they could to convince Pilate that Jesus was a would-be alternative monarch to Tiberius Caesar, the emperor of the Roman Empire. That Pilate could not allow.
So now we skip ahead to the Last Supper. It was the last activity of Jesus as a free man before his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Every year, when the liturgical calendar brings us to the Last Supper, we are again filled with foreboding. That happens to us because it first happened to Jesus himself. By that point in the unfolding of the Holy Week drama, Jesus knew that he could not longer avert his enemies. He was about to be securely bound and taken to Pontius Pilate. He realized it could not be avoided. Therefore he wanted to prepare the disciples for what lay ahead of them. Somehow they did not sense the danger of that Thursday evening Passover meal, but Jesus sensed it in the deepest recesses of his tortured spirit. If they had no idea how to interpret his impending death, they would be crushed into oblivion by the certainty of its rapid progression.
Therefore, symbolically Jesus used the unleavened bread and the wine of the Passover seder dinner to express what awaited him and his disciples. At the time they must have been mystified by what he was saying. Afterward, however, when he was very soon to be arrested, and then put through a hurried trial with its already foregone conclusion, and Jesus was forced to carry his own heavy cross to the place were he was to be executed, no disciple could have forgotten those cryptic words in the upper room: “Take this bread; it is my body, broken for you. Take this cup; it is my blood, shed for you.”The atmosphere was so heavy, each moment seemed weighed down with meaning, but no one dared ask Jesus specifically what he meant. Later, afterwards, after the bewildered amazement of Easter and the post-Easter appearances and the ascension, the import of what had happened at the Last Supper would remain firmly lodged in the minds and spirits of every disciple privileged to have been there.
The Last Supper quickly became one of the central features of Christianity for the past twenty centuries. For millions of Christians through the ages, especially Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Episcopalians, and many Lutherans, it is the centerpiece of the Christian faith. “This is my body, broken for you; this is my blood, shed for you.”
The table is ready. Once again, let us observe the sacrament Jesus himself instituted on our behalf.